By Lee A. Daniels:

I went home last Sunday, to Saint Paul A.M.E. Church, in Atlanta, Georgia.

I had never been there before.

I was visiting Saint Paul for a special occasion. But, from the moment I walked in one of the doors to the church’s lower level that leads to its spacious family life center and warren of offices and meeting rooms, I felt in familiar territory.

It wasn’t just the smiling greetings I got from everyone I met in those first moments and all through my day-long visit. It was just being in the space of a traditionally arranged black church.

In terms of its physical interior, Saint Paul, like most black churches today, is far more open and airy than the churches I grew up in as a child and adolescent forty years ago. But the feeling I felt Sunday was the same I felt then in all five of the churches – two A.M.E. Zion, one Episcopal, and two Baptist — I spent my youth in.

I knew that feeling came from being in the House of the Lord. But it was not until, sitting through the Sunday service in the church’s elegantly spare congregation, that I pulled back from the flood of emotion washing over me and realized that the spirit I felt populating the space above our heads was more than the Lord’s spirit.

It was the spirit of our ancestors, too. The spirit of my grandmother and father and mother, who had raised me and my siblings and had some years ago gone beyond The River. It was the spirit of all the others of the black Americans who lived in this land since those twenty captive Africans were put upon the shore at Jamestown.

I felt all of them there in the congregation at Saint Paul. I could hear all of my ancestors singing. I could see their reflections in the faces of the members of the men’s Bible Study Group and the ushers and the deaconesses who smiled at me and called me “Brother.” And I could hear it in the deep-voiced words of the Reverend Doctor Thomas L. Bess, Sr., its senior pastor, who at the end of our long day, said, “Well, Brother Daniels, now you have a home here in Atlanta.”

I certainly do.

Lee A. Daniels is editor-in-chief of TheDefendersOnline.com